HocMoi is a new startup bringing foreign online courses to Vietnam

Credit: Googleblog.blogspot.ca

There’s quite a few less-than-one-year-old startups in Vietnam these days, and education is one sector which is starting to see startups make an entry. We’ve written about two of them: DeltaViet, which is empowering local teachers to run online courses, and Classbook, which is manufacturing a tablet for children’s education. Now HocMoi, a new competitor to the online course arena, has entered the ring.

HocMoi works with companies like Udemy, which specializes in selling skills courses online, and pays a licensing fee for the content, then HocMoi has a content team which translates the courses into Vietnamese. Founder of HocMoi, Tran Ngoc, says one of the problems he has seen is Vietnamese experts are not so forthcoming about their expertise.

Since the culture of sharing is not exactly there yet, HocMoi is working on seeding content from foreign courses first. Currently, we only have three Vietnamese courses of the total 31 that we are offering. The rest is all from sites like Udemy.

HocMoi , which means “new learning”, is different from DeltaViet in that it takes foreign courses and puts them online. The latter startup, on the other hand, focuses on getting Vietnamese courses on its platform.

Since HocMoi’s August launch, the site has accumulated just over 100 paying users on the site. In contrast, DeltaViet has over 500 paying students. This likely indicates that the market for online courses remains small, so at present it’s not clear yet if HocMoi or DeltaViet will be successful. Still, the need for education in Vietnam is palpable: education in Vietnam is struggling to keep up with the global trends and an economy that is in desperate need of an educated workforce.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear yet if such models can scale. Unlike DeltaViet, which collects over 90 percent of its revenue from telco scratch cards, HocMoi collects 100 percent of its money from the local NganLuong payment platform. Both models still have not gained widespread traction, and this will continue to be a limiting factor in online education as a whole.

(Editing by Josh Horwitz)